The Empire Behind Every Sign: Sinocentric Originism and the Mythopoiesis of Total History in Chinese Cyberspace

This article examines a corpus of popular pseudohistorical claims on the Chinese internet, such as the claim that the Han people are the descendants of a divine race that once held global primacy, and that they are awakening to restore order from Western civilizations that ended their hegemony and concealed the history, etc. I analyze them as a textual formation with a distinct grammar, which I call Sinocentric originism. The development of Chinese online pseudohistory is summarized in this article into five mechanisms: mythic totalization, philological mythopoiesis, archival alibi, ontological escalation, and the final normative closure. Comparing this corpus with the Ruhnama, QAnon, and Ynglism, I identify a form of total history produced without a central author or institution. Drawing on Gu Jiegang's theory of layered antiquity, I argue that these alleged origins are better understood as modern projections onto the past.